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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not want to detain the House for a long time and I shall not. My noble friend Lord Deben has gone too far, as he did when he did not renew me as chairman of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. He came to a very bad judgment about that and I entirely support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester in his thesis. I make one practical point about the Zurbaráns in Auckland Castle. The Church Commissioners are responsible for £5 billion worth of financial and property assets. The income from that funds 16 per cent of the church’s expenditure. The other 84 per cent comes, largely, from the congregations of the church and from, as the right reverend Prelate said, appeals for repairs and appeals for lead for the roof which needs renewing and so on. I think that the Church Commissioners and the church should take account of two things as they consider the position of the Zurbaráns. They need the support of their congregations. I do not think that it is certain that they will get £15 million for the Zurbaráns. The last time that this came up, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland, will remember, the Bowes Museum got an estimate from the market—not from Christie's or Sotheby's—and quoted £6 million, not £15 million or £20 million, which I think was the Sotheby's quote. So there is an issue about the risk which the Church Commissioners are taking with these pictures, which has nothing to do with the romantic story of Bishop Trevor, and that one of the pictures is a copy by Mr Pond for 24 guineas and the other pictures cost 21 guineas each. That is a very romantic story that has all the connotations of the disabilities of the Jews and all those things. However, if the congregation in the north-east supported a solution which meant that the Church Commissioners could add on, shall I say, £12 million to £5 billion, you could say that that is likely to be a good judgment, not a bad one. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, I do not think that the church has to hang on to every asset. One could suggest that it sells the divorce papers of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, which sit in the library in Lambeth Palace. I do not know how much they would make, but I would guess quite a lot of money. We should not get tremendously excited about this. It is a practical issue, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester has presented it to us. It is full of practical judgments, but the church needs the support of its congregations. I say rather quietly that in the north-east, there is the Dean of Durham—I remind the House that there is no Bishop of Durham at the moment. Durham Cathedral has an appeal out now. Are the Church Commissioners absolutely certain that they will not lose by raising £12 million and having an income of £360,000 a year—the Church Commissioners’ assets yield 3 per cent—because congregations will say, ““If you can do this and that, we are not going to give you so much money every Sunday or when you make an appeal””?